


has-beens

by potted_music



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-04 22:11:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14602812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: Not one species of any creature which flourished before the tertiary now exists. Thus to find not only frequent additions to the previous existing forms, but frequent withdrawals of forms which had apparently become inappropriate is a fact calculated very forcibly to arrest attention.Robert Chambers,Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation(1844)In which Dr. Goodsir lives to become a renowned naturalist studying the history of extinction, John Bridgens quotes Sappho, Crozier lives happily ever after with Silna, and a reasonably non-horrible time is had by all, except by those who are dead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: English is not my first language; historical accuracy is not my priority; a mix-and-match of book and TV canon to double the angst; canon-typical yuck; background period-typical -isms (not from the protagonists); handwaving some, but not all canonical deaths; sorry not sorry.

_Lat. 51°-29' N., Long. 0°-0' W.  
London, May, 1854.  
A reception at the Arctic Society_

 

"Their fourth is on the way, did you hear? But then, that’s native intemperance for you. Obscene, if you ask me."

Richard R. Richardson, the surprisingly sprightly and unsurprisingly drunk old man whom Bridgens vaguely recognizes as a lieutenant from Franklin's disastrous Coppermine expedition, touches his snout of a nose, and winks conspiratorially. Bridgens looks around, taking stock of the present, the absences all the more glaring among the throng of decorated shoulders.

Crozier is absent, of course, as is his wont, much to the relief of the gossiping masses who are freed by his nonattendance to slander his mute native wife. Not that the captain’s presence would have put a stop to pervasive whispers, Bridgens thinks, and shudders at the realization that the venomous tongues have made him think of her the way they do, if for the space of a second: as a voiceless caricature not worthy even of a name. Silna, Lady Silence, he thinks firmly, angry not so much at the man who knew no better as at himself, who did. 

"She saved us two score times and more on our last trek," he says. "You would be well advised to avoid that tone with the men whose very presence here is testament to her ingenuity and decency. If you'll excuse me..."

As Bridgens starts to manoeuvre himself past the man, which proves quite a challenge in the festive and almost rowdy crowd, Richardson places an arthritic hand on his shoulder and cackles with barely contained glee.

“Indeed, your group’s survival makes for a splendid tale. I hear the lectures detailing it were a resounding success. The Discovery Service was swarmed with new recruits.”

Bridgens did attend one lecture, two years ago now, only to shamble out blindly about midway through, rattled and disoriented with the flood of fresh grief that he thought had long dried up with the passage of time. The pompous account of their feat was little more than glorified grave robbery, and not a day passed when he wouldn’t go cold with fear at the thought that their tragedy, twisted and refashioned into something altogether more magnificent than its surviving witnesses remembered, enticed more naïve young men into the same icy trap. Cautiously, he says, “The Discovery Service has never had a shortage of recruits. The pay’s legendary.”

“Yes, yes,” Richardson waves impatiently, taking a swig of sherry he should probably have forgone, “but bright-eyed boys, bless them, need camaraderie and romance no less than they need the coins. Of course, now that McClure’s expedition has returned victorious from the Northwest Passage and we no longer need to glorify earlier failed attempts, one is moved to ask what might have been omitted in the sanitized recounting.”

“Quite a lot of frostbitten digits. Gums rotten with scurvy. Bleeding from all orifices, that’s scurvy too, as you well know,” Bridgens finds himself speaking faster and faster. “And rivulets of black shit marking our path with as much clarity as trodden snow. The usual fare, if seldom discussed in polite society.”

“That’s little more than you might suffer at home, if you subsist on the sort of diet many of these boys had growing up. It’s no stain on our dignity and humanity, unlike some other things one might choose to do.”

Bridgens almost laughs in relief at Richardson’s overly ominous emphasis on the last words. Familiarity has made these aspersions feel deceptively safe, compared to other things that might have been said, and his behaviour has been beyond reproach over the last years in any case. Relief barely has the time to sink in though before Richardson continues.

“Or might be forced to do as the last resort.”

Bridgens could swear there was affability of a shared disgraceful secret in the last phrase. Of course he knows the euphemism “the last resort,” as most in the Discovery Service do. The rumours are never far below the surface, and sometimes not far from the truth either. Did Richardson ever partake of that most ignoble meal? Did the pious, God-fearing Franklin? He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, but the absences, the ones that do not bear thinking about, still nag at the edges of his consciousness.

“I do not know what you could possibly mean,” he says too sharply, betraying that he does.

Indeed, Richardson croons, “I won’t insult your intelligence by believing you.”

“You’d rather insult me by calling me a liar then?”

The man shrugs. "We are a queer and curious bunch, us old Arctic hands. We’ve seen the lands where even God’s gaze cannot pierce the winter dark, and we sometimes bring back strange notions. Take young Dr. Goodsir, for example. His treatises about an irrational God that excises phenomena from the original design are so provocative that one might believe he’s suggesting that there’s no God at all. And once you take God out of the equation, what’s to stop you from doing your worst?"

“Dr. Goodsir is the most moral man I know,” Bridgens says. In his long life, few things have inspired utmost certainty in him. This fact does.

“Many would disagree. Maybe even most.”

Here he cannot argue. Bridgens has attended a couple of Goodsir’s speeches about the worlds before ours, legible only from fossilized brittle bones—always staying at the back, out of Goodsir's line of sight so as not to remind him of that which should by right be forgotten—and he saw the booing crowds. Instead of arguing, he asks, “Is he here?”

“He is,” Richardson nods towards the back of the room. “He honours us with his presence so rarely that we didn’t think he would come today. Well, there must be a notion of what’s right in his head after all if he did come to welcome back McClure and his men.”

Left to his own devices, Bridgens in all likelihood would not have approached Dr. Goodsir, and would likely have regretted the decision. He is denied the contrite luxury of self-reproach as Richardson leads the way.

Dr. Goodsir is surrounded by a small group of enraptured listeners that Bridgens has neither the desire nor the vigour to squeeze through. Poised behind his back, at quite a respectable distance, Bridgens cannot help but notice the new streaks of grey in his hair.

“How I lost my ear?” Dr. Goodsir gives an apologetic half-laugh. “Why yes, that’s a capital story.”

His voice is too soft for Bridgens to piece the story together over the din of the room, but even from the snatches that he does hear—teeth exploding in the extreme cold weather, unfortunately positioned rockets, a football match in the light of the aurora borealis—he can tell that the story has the benefit of being entertaining and unlikely to cause offence even in mixed company; all the benefits, in short, but the one of being true.

"So, there I was, with three pails of specimen of the diminutive Arctic _Crustacea_ , an irate monkey, a single-shot pistol," Dr Goodsir continues. “Most of my _Crustacea_ are on display in the British Museum, incidentally, so you can check the story’s veracity for yourself.”

Bridgens cannot help but laugh at his overly sincere tone, and the sound makes Dr. Goodsir look back over his right shoulder. As their gazes lock, Bridgens instinctively raises his palm to his lips, wishing he could jump back in time, clench his teeth, avoid interrupting, avoid being seen. Dr. Goodsir chokes momentarily on whatever he was saying, but the pause is masked up by polite nods from the company. It takes him a half dozen seconds to recompose himself, but continue he does.

"Be that as it may," he says, “any fool will tell you that monkeys are no friends to gunfire, and that is how…”

Against his will, Bridgens finds himself nodding along even as he wonders whether it's just one more thing on the extensive catalogue of things one does not admit outside the Arctic, supporting the polite fiction that humankind is intrinsically honourable and good, or if Goodsir has come to believe the lie himself.

The truth is that he no longer knows Dr. Goodsir, so he cannot answer that question with any certainty. But he does know his body.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going with the book canon on how Hickey's team abducted Crozier and Goodsir. Crozier is wounded, crawls off to die, and is rescued by Silna; Goodsir is carried off by Hickey's team. After that, I happily wander off into the AU fix-it land.
> 
> Oh, and geography here makes absolutely no sense, but I'm not in it for geography.

_August 1848_  
Lat. Unknown, Long. Unknown  
King William Land, Rescue Camp 

There was a time when he hated Dr. Goodsir, and that time was not short. Not given to hate by disposition, he gorged and feasted on the cache unplundered over the course of his long life, and this sustenance, bitter though it was, got him through the dragging viscous days, days without end, when there was nothing else to sustain him. Dr. Goodsir enticed Bridgens away from the brink of death, see, and, having denied him that solace, all he gave in return were the lonely vigils over the dying men, the stench of rotting flesh, and wiping men caked with piss and sick with a cloth dabbed in barely thawed snow.

*

(The wind was picking up, and the gravel under him was very cold. He tucked Peglar’s diary deeper into his coat pocket, pulled up his collar, and began to wait for death to come. Instead there was a rustle of cautious steps, distant at first. He screwed his eyes shut in naïve hope that not looking might make him invisible, or even make the final darkness envelope him faster. He had no such luck, and the steps drew closer. He winced with irritation, realizing that he did not even need to open his eyes to recognize the intruder into his last nap. There was a crunch of gravel as the man paused and sat down a respectful distance away, not close enough to reach out a hand and touch him but not far enough to be ignored, and then silence settled over them like early snow. Bridgens could no longer feel his toes. He tried to focus on breathing, but the man’s breaths intruded on his thoughts too much.

“I would be grateful if you left,” he said. “If anything, this trek should have taught you that you cannot keep everyone alive, and moreover not against their will.”

“Tell me about Harry Peglar,” Dr. Goodsir said quietly and calmly, as if talking to a skittish horse. 

“He was a good man,” Bridgens said, turning to face away from the surgeon.

“I could tell you as much myself,” Goodsir said, “tell me what I could not.”

Angry at the intrusion, he dredged up the only thing that mattered. “I wanted him to be wrong, but he knew I would live to bury him.”

“Hoped,” Goodsir said, adding nothing for a long while. After Bridgens turned back to look at him, he said, “He _hoped_ you would live to bury him. Please come back, Mr. Bridgens. Don’t begrudge him that one last kindness.”

“The dead have no use for kindness.”

“That might be so,” Dr. Goodsir said with a nod, “but otherwise it’s as if they have never lived.”

He had not wept before, but he did weep then, for Harry Peglar, for himself and for the burden he would have to shoulder for another dark indeterminate stretch, and the walk back to the camp was the hardest and most shameful thing Bridgens had ever done in his life that was not thrifty with things both shameful and hard.) 

*

Hence the hate. It’s not so bad, he tells himself as he grits his teeth, sets his lifelong squeamishness aside, and assists Dr. Goodsir with amputations. It’s not so bad, he tells himself when they leave the dead by the trek because nobody has the strength to dig proper graves anymore. It’s not so bad, he tells himself when Dr. Goodsir pulls his sleeves down, hiding the same tell-tale scurvy bruises they see on so many of their patients. It’s not so bad, he tells himself when Camp Land’s End is hastily renamed Rescue Camp so that nobody would have to feel too guilty about leaving the sick behind to die. It’s not so bad, he tells himself when Dr. Goodsir is unquestionably, horribly kind to him, with a kindness born of blindness to his silences and guilt.

And then Robert Golding, that treacherous little pest, lures Goodsir and Crozier from the relative safety of the Rescue Camp out into the maze of pressure ridges and seracs, and straight into the hands of Hickey’s cannibals, and it gets very bad indeed.

Lieutenant Little tries to first persuade, then shout him into joining the party of the healthier men leaving Rescue Camp behind, apparently unaware of the unappealing indignities of continued survival. Bridgens argues, cajoles and wheedles Little into leaving him a shotgun and cartridges to ward off the cannibals, should they double back to the camp, and makes sure that the remaining stores are divided equally before Little’s party and his nineteen dying men. There is some resentment about leaving an equal share of food for the men who are unlikely to need it for much longer, but Bridgens stands his ground, and congratulates himself on his foresight as the number drops to eighteen before the first day is over, but does not dwindle further for a while.

He rations despair like he rations his store of six individually wrapped pieces of dark chocolate, allowing himself what he has come to describe as “a moment” now and again, and then rolling up his sleeves and getting back to work. He is not a steward for nothing, trained in taking care of the men who were often neither easy nor particularly pleasant to take care of. Habits acquired over the course of a lifetime take another lifetime to unlearn, and another lifetime is what he does not have. He cleans up wounds, wipes away the filth with melted snow, and warms up tinned soup on a beat-up spirit stove. He wanders around the campsite, gathering broken pieces of wood, planks and oars, performing the rituals of hope and pretending without much faith that his men have a future in which they might need crutches to march towards safety. And through all these days, he clings to his hate for Dr. Goodsir, who dragged him from the threshold of death into a predicament not much better than death by any reckoning.

After eating his fourth slice of chocolate, he does his rounds of the sick tents. Jopson, he decides, will not live to see daybreak, too weak now even to lift his head to drink without help. But then, the man had proven him wrong before, and these paltry miracles, inconsequential in the long run, still feel like a triumph. 

He eats his last slice of chocolate on the twelfth day after Little’s departure, savouring the sweetness. He watches the sun set, rolling the long-familiar lines on his tongue: _Then slowly sunk the ruddy globe of light, and o'er the shaded landscape rush'd the night._ Maybe Dr. Stanley was right after all: a painful death, but quick and preceded with some warmth at least, the swift rush of the night over the shaded landscape, was much preferable to this slow and miserable slog. His habitual introspective indecision prevents him from making the choice for all the men left in his care, but of his own life he is master enough. He almost laughs at the realization, and at the futility of his toil over the last days. He will walk into the ice, and put an overdue end to it. The thought that that would doom his men sits uneasy in his mind, but then, with their meagre and fast diminishing rations, they are likely to all be dead by mid-September at the very latest.

He visits all tents for one last time. Jopson is still stubbornly, inexplicably alive, although not very coherent. When Bridgens gets up to leave, Jopson mumbles something barely audible. He has to lean closer to hear, “I wiped his arse when he was going off drink, and he left me here to die like a dog.”

Bridgens briefly considers which answer might be kinder, but kindness is what got him into this mess to begin with, and he is past being kind.

“He is dead, Mr. Jopson,” he says. “Captain Crozier is dead, or worse.”

Until he isn’t. As Bridgens walks out of Jopson’s tent, blinking at the sunlight for the final time, he initially mistakes the figure right in front him for a cruel mirage. He veers off to the side, doing his best to ignore the tricks his mind is playing on him, until what sounds suspiciously like Crozier’s voice croaks from a light sledge,

“I could really use a whiskey right about now.”

“You and me both, Captain,” he says, wiping his brow.

Lady Silence look curiously from one man to the other. The land that has been miserly with miracles, except for those of the most horrible kind, has finally spit up a miracle too grand and too generous to be believed.

*

Bridgens accompanies Lady Silence on her hunting trips out onto the strait to the south of the camp, into the jumble of ice, pressure ridges and seracs that is an illegible cacophony of elements to him but an open book to her. She finds and hunts seals, waiting patiently over their breathing holes and then pouring sweet water into their mouths so that the seal’s soul would tell its mates that these hunters are good and kind.

Seal meat and blubber, unanimously deemed too oily and astringent early on in the expedition, is the best thing he ever tasted. Not a morsel goes to waste, not even blood. He holds up the men in a sitting position and helps them to drink seal blood in a grotesque parody of a communion, wiping off scarlet droplets that are, just this once, not theirs. Men he thought would be dead before long start regaining strength, bruises retreating, bleeding diminishing and then stopping altogether. Even George Chambers and David Leys, reduced to an unresponsive catatonic state after Tuunbaq’s attacks, start showing an interest in the world around them. He carefully guides them out of their tent and gives them whittling knives to prepare wooden legs for the men who lost their limbs and their hope of ever seeing the world outside Rescue Camp.

Crozier, riddled with bullet wounds after his encounter with Hickey and his cronies, is the last to heal, but even he eventually starts walking about, first leaning heavily on Lady Silence, and eventually on his own. Before leaving, they wander out to the place where Robert Golding lured Goodsir and Crozier, several weeks ago now. There’s blood on the ice, and sections of a spinal cord, and shreds of viscera strewn about. John Lane and William Goddard, Crozier explains. But no sign that could shed light on the fate of Dr. Goodsir. 

“They would have long devoured him,” Crozier said. “And even if he survived the first encounter, he’s been left to Hickey’s whims for too long to hold much hope.”

Losing one Harry was a tragedy, losing two smacks of carelessness. Good thing he hated the second one.

“I know he’s dead,” Bridgens said. “It just didn’t feel right to leave without checking.”

Bridgens is not sure who was the first to bring up Fury Beach again, but this is where they head.

*

(“I think I doomed us all,” Bridgens whispered frantically late one night, or in the milky dusk that had the audacity to pass for one in this frigid summer, in the uncertain hours when his defences wore down. It was Dr. Goodsir’s last night at Rescue Camp before the abduction, but none of them knew that yet.

“That’s hubris,” Dr. Goodsir said groggily, rolling over in his sleeping bag. “You should sleep, Mr. Bridgens. Everything will look brighter come morning.”

“But I did,” he said, hoping to dispel Dr. Goodsir’s unearned trust. “Our best hope of survival was to make a dash for Fury Beach, where Ross left boats and provisions. Whalers come by until fairly late in the season, and even if not, between the cache and some luck hunting, we would have had a reasonable chance of lasting until next spring.”

They stayed silent for a while as a recent amputee moaned through restless sleep in the next tent over. The pause grew so long that Bridgens started to suspect that Dr. Goodsir had nodded off when there finally came a whispered answer, “I’m certain other people were aware of the option, and found it less than optimal.”

“Crozier knew of the cache, because I brought it up with him. I live with the guilty fear that the only fault with the Fury Beach plan was that I was the one to have laid it on the table.” He hesitated before continuing, but pressed on. “I fear he discarded it because I was a mere subordinate officers’ steward on his last voyage, and a known sodomite to boot. My proclivities are not as well hidden as I would like to believe.”

“Yes.” If Bridgens expected a reaction that was not a soft monosyllable, none seemed forthcoming. In the silence filled with snores from neighbouring tents and the distant growling sighs of ice ridges which never slept, he cautioned himself to never mistake kindness for blindness again. Eventually Goodsir said, “Not well hidden at all, I’m afraid, but Crozier’s will to live is too strong to hinge it on an incidental of anybody’s birth or station in life. You do not know his reasoning, Mr. Bridgens. Don’t torture yourself only to nurture the illusion that any of this could be controlled. We are fools on a fool’s errand, likely to be dead before the winter dark sets in. I can give you a dollop of morphine if you absolutely need it, although it might be more prudent to leave it for the next amputations. Who knows, we might need one too.”)

*

Without having to haul their tents and boats along, burdened with nothing but small sledges piled with minimal necessities, the going is much faster. Lady Silence builds them neat little huts of ice to wait out the storms, lined with seal skins, lit with pungent seal fat. They might still not be too late for the last whalers to pick them up, or, if all else fails, the presence of Lady Silence gives them a fighting chance of surviving to see the next spring. Hope chaffs, rankles and stinks like a foot not properly wrapped and not properly dried over a long and wet trek.

When they climb up yet another pressure ridge to survey the lay of the land beyond it and spy a small camp not more than a couple hundred yards out, they almost pass it by. It couldn’t be anybody but Hickey and his men: not the company likely to make their plight any easier. No smoke rises from the small dot on the pristine landscape, but that does not mean that the cannibals are not lying in wait. While they frantically confer, Lady Silence smells the air, frowns, and slips off the ice slope towards the camp. Crozier abandons the discussion mid-phrase to clamber after her, favouring his injured leg. Jopson is the next to rush after his captain, still feeling guilty, Bridgens suspects, for believing that Crozier could abandon him. Bridgens follows third.

There are no sounds emanating from the camp as they approach.

“He that liveth wickedly-” Jopson mutters under his breath, only to be cut short by Crozier.

“They were our comrades and friends. They were just tired, and scared, and sick.”

Lady Silence is the first to step into the camp, Crozier at her side with his pistol cocked. Bridgens freezes in place with the fear of a small animal in the dark as he spies the towering mound of dirty off-white fur speckled with blood, but Lady Silence leans over the creature that terrorized them on the ice without any hesitation.

In death, Bridgens realizes to his surprise, Tuunbaq looks horribly sad, a terrible and magnificent being brought low by their shared fate.

“Blanky’s forks worked,” Crozier chuckles.

“Or he choked on this spiteful rat-face,” Jopson says, kicking at the mangled remains barely recognizable as Hickey.

Lady Silence circles the camp, peering into the boat and wind-swept tents, sniffing at the plates, licking small objects she picks up seemingly at random. Bridgens has to close his eyes because of the sudden surge of grief: with all the horrors in the dark gone, it’s just them, them and their petty failures. He almost misses the moment when Lady Silence bends over what looks like a pile of dirty rags, leans closer to sniff at it, and then waves her hand, beckoning them closer. Crozier is the first to reach her, leaning on her shoulder to go to his knees and inspect her latest find. When he speaks up, Bridgens can barely believe his ears.

“He is alive. Dr. Goodsir is alive.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) Remember when I believed that I won't need more than 3 chapters to get to porn? That was cute, but unrealistic.
> 
> (2) Goodsir's experience at Hickey's camp follows the book canon, and the note is lifted from the novel verbatim.

Alive, as it soon turns out, might have been too strong a word. When Captain Crozier tries to lift him up by the shoulders, Goodsir hangs boneless in his grip, as weak and insensate as a rag doll. His eyes remain closed, his lips are chapped and blue like a bruise, as if his mouth was a festering wound rather than a natural orifice. Bridgens leans down and picks up a note pinned to the doctor’s chest, squinting to decipher the shaky uncertain hand that reminds him for a terrible grief-stricken moment of another Harry. The note reads, “Eat these mortal remnas of Dr Harry D.S. Goodsir ifff yo u wisssh the poissssn within ths bones and felsh wiol kill you also.”

When he cants the note to let Crozier peruse it, Lady Silence leans closer, and for an impossible instant he believes that she might kiss Goodsir, but she just sniffs at his lips, and then throws her head back and mimes taking a long drink.

Standing up on one knee, Crozier turns on him with anger born, Bridgens knows, of desperation, but no less horrifying for it. “What did he take? What was in his medical kit when he left?”

He wracks his brain, a beast sluggish with fatigue and intuition of anguishes to come. “Morphine, most definitely. Laudanum. Dover’s Powders, if we had any left. I don’t remember, we could have exhausted our store by then. Does it matter now?” In his mind, he buried the man, unmourned but missed. This travesty of hope, doled out only to be snatched away the very next second, serves nothing, just another petty cruelty in a long line of similar mockeries without rhyme or reason. He pulls off his mitten and presses his fingers to the underside of Goodsir’s jaw, hoping for a pulse, but his fingers are too numb with cold and fear. 

While he scrutinizes the fresh blood staining his fingers, Lady Silence efficiently rolls Goodsir onto his side, opens his mouth and stuffs her hand in, as if looking for something, a clue, a scared soul hiding within. She’s pressing on the root of his tongue, Bridgens realizes, when Goodsir coughs up some bile, his long body shaking with terrible coughs like a small rowboat cast about and broken apart in choppy weather. As the doctor thrashes under Lady Silence’s unsentimental ministrations, his matted hair parts, revealing the source of blood on his jaw: a jagged, mangled piece of flesh is all that remains of Goodsir’s ear. Then seizures start. If Dr. Goodsir expected a quick and quiet passing, he sorely miscalculated.

How fortunate to have Crozier here, Bridgens thinks detachedly when a memory of a similar scene swims up to the surface of his consciousness: the captain poised by a prostrate trembling form, death waiting in the wings. Crozier bears responsibility for them all, body and soul, and maybe he will extend to Goodsir the same mercy he did to Fitzjames, absolving the other men of the necessity to make that choice. When Fitzjames passed away, Bridgens still entertained the childish hope that there will be poems; he no longer can afford the luxury. Their plight will be recorded through nothing but bones, which tell only the crudest of stories: the simple declarative statement of a full skeleton lovingly buried in the best shirt, the lurid anecdote of a long bone split for marrow, the menacing tale of bones with serrated knife marks scratched deep into their bleached surface. Unlike Goodsir, Bridgens sees no poetry in skeletal remains, and this small sordid camp—an epic to rival the works of the great blind bard Homer to a skilled anatomist—is mute to him, a mockery made of a heroic feat.

“I will tell the men,” Bridgens says, clambering to his feet.

Indeed, the rest of their party needs to be told, if not the full extent of what he saw then something at least, but that’s not the whole reason why he retraces their steps back to the sledges, stumbling on heavy feet over smaller stones and solid blocks of ice. He’s come to the end of hope, and then some empty miles past it, and this he cannot take. The fact that he left his men waiting behind the ridge with the orders to proceed onwards as planned should their reconnaissance party fail to return within two hours is just a happy coincidence providing him with a convenient excuse to dash back. (He’s not sure when he started to think of them, quite presumptuously, as _his_ men, but it is high time he broke himself of the habit. They are Captain Crozier’s men, of course, and Crozier is twice the man he is, ready to lead by example without showing a sliver of doubt. But Captain Crozier stays by Goodsir’s side, so his own feeble guidance will have to suffice.)

“Let us reload the cargo and free up one sled for Dr. Goodsir. Please don’t get up, Mr. Honey,” he says, as the man who lost both his legs at the ankle tries laboriously to join the effort. “Here, if you could make some tea, the returning men—and the woman too, no doubt—would greatly appreciate it, I’m sure.” 

He helps Mr. Honey to settle as comfortably as possible on a backpack and leaves him to attend to a meagre lick of flames that passes for a welcoming fire. As he carries his paltry selection of books, the sad remains of his once proud library, over to the next sledge, he takes a second to savour the agitated bustle the like of which the crew has not seen since before the ships were abandoned. The not unlikely case in which all their efforts come to nothing does not bear thinking about, but the need to furnish the men with an occupation far outweighs his fears, for it is in the idle moments that the horror sets in. Should it come to naught, he will just have to come up with a new job for them, and another one after that, and so forth, until the ice parts or they cannot press on anymore.

He chooses George Chambers to accompany him to Hickey’s camp and help pull back their Orpheus returning from the underworld, but Marine Corporal Pearson volunteers instead. 

“The thing from the ice no longer haunts us, Mr. Pearson,” Bridgens tries to assure him. “I wouldn’t dare to presume upon your expertise.”

Nothing terrible haunts them anymore, nothing more terrible, that is, than the miseries, indignities and horrors that have long become their faithful companions, and that’s what he’s trying to shield Pearson from, but, unwilling to say so outright, has to capitulate under the marine’s insistence.

By the time they reach Hickey’s camp, Goodsir’s state has not improved, but neither has it deteriorated. He whimpers when they load him onto the sled and swaddle in sealskins like an oversized babe, but does not show any further signs of consciousness. While Bridgens picks up Goodsir’s backpack and fastens it to the sledge in case the man lives to need it again, Pearson makes his own careful round of the camp. Bridgens sees the unflappable marine pinch his brow as he picks up a couple buttons from the campfire.

“He might stay an idiot for what remains of his life, however short that might be,” Crozier says, eyeing Goodsir dubiously, without taking care to pitch his voice low. “I hope to God we are bringing him along for the right reasons.”

Pearson appears behind his left shoulder in the blink of an eye, fast as a thing spun of ice and malice, and only a little less angry. “Not as food, you mean? What high esteem you hold us in,” the marine growls, only to add reluctantly, “Captain, sir.”

Bridgens, not altogether innocent of this suspicion either, feels the need to intervene. “You are forgetting how low a hungry man can stoop, and how easily our fates may turn.” Having no natural inclination for harsher intonations, he feels his voice turn plaintive rather than stern. “And to avoid just that, we’d do well to continue apace.”

He prays that Crozier doesn’t suggest a whipping, a punishment doubtlessly disastrous for the morale in their present condition and not necessarily enforceable to begin with; fortunately, the captain obeys his unspoken plea. He lets Pearson haul the sledge while Lady Silence leads the way, picking out the smoothest route so that Dr. Goodsir wouldn’t have to suffer too many bumps and jostles on the way.

“Not another damn sea lawyer,” Crozier grumbles under his breath, falling into step with Bridgens at the tail of their small procession.

“He’s a good man,” Bridgens shrugs apologetically. “And a friend of Tozer’s. He took Tozer’s betrayal hard, and came here to find, I think, some proof of his repentance. What he found was not much consolation, I’m afraid.”

Their return takes longer because they have to circumnavigate the pressure ridge with their fragile cargo, but, once they rejoin the main party, causes not inconsiderable merriment. After a grand show of rifling through all his pockets (London has lost a truly great thespian when the short young man chose a career in the Navy, Bridgens decides), genial Thomas Hartnell produces three pieces of chocolate. Divided by their party of two-and-twenty, the slices do not amount to much more then a lingering hint of sweetness on the tongue, but in this land of penury even the smallest things do marvels to the men’s spirits. Mr. Honey, a staunch believer in chocolate’s medicinal properties, suggests that they should melt Dr. Goodsir’s share in warm water and pour it down his throat, and Bridgens cannot help but smile as the men fuss over the unconscious doctor like so many ineffectual mother hen. The scene substantially alleviates Captain Crozier’s fears if not lays them to rest altogether, or so Bridgens has to hope for all their sakes. After a hurried supper of seal blubber and boiled lichen they have taken to calling tea, they are underway in the deepening, de-fanged dark that contains no fresh horrors.

When they settle for the night, it’s closer to dawn (the rose-fingered dawn, his mind supplies, even if anaemic Arctic daybreak is no match to the multi-coloured splendour of Mediterranean sunrises), but Bridgens does not forgo their nightly ritual of reading to the men before they go to sleep, a custom started to preserve his own sanity when he was still in charge of Rescue Camp, and kept on at popular demand: the men grew to like their cloud-capp'd tow'rs and the gorgeous palaces, even if Bridgens suspects that a well-placed dockside ditty wouldn’t go amiss either.

Sleep was never a particular talent of his, his body or some scared corner of his mind resenting and dreading this nightly willing surrender to darkness, and falling asleep is getting harder with each passing year. For hours, or what feels like hours, he listens to the complaints of his body, old bones protesting against the rough treatment, the cold, the unforgiving hard bedding, and when he does drift off without noticing it—for worries, in some shape or other, hound him in his resting hours too—he is shaken out of slumber by screams.

He sits up with a jolt, his joints revolting against sudden movement, and casts about, expecting to see a scene of carnage, limb torn from limb, gore and viscera everywhere. It’s pitch-black though, the soupy darkness already boiling with movement. Bridgens tries to stand up, but is immediately trampled to the ground by someone stampeding for the exit. Someone else’s elbow knocks the breath out of him. The high scream continues, uninterrupted by sleepy curses and footfalls. Finally a gunshot cuts through the din, the brief flare of the shot further blinding him rather than shedding light on the scene. A man strikes a Lucifer match (Bridgens would bet good money on Jopson, for a loyal steward to a capricious man is likely to be the person most prepared for all eventualities, bar none), but that light, too, goes out in an instant as the match is knocked out of his hand. Fortunately, the screaming cuts off too.

“Stop right this instant,” Jopson growls, proving Bridgens right, and the chaos eventually subsides. The man strikes a match again, and this time it takes.

Bridgens squints at his surroundings. There’s a new gunshot hole in the roof, but none of the men seem injured. He sees Pearson set his shotgun aside guiltily, Chambers back away from the low entrance to their hut, and Jopson survey the habitation’s interior with a stern expression.

“What was this about?” he manages, his voice hoarse with fright.

“It’s him, Mr. Bridgens. It’s Dr. Goodsir,” yells Mr. Honey, who lay closest to the doctor.

As if in answer, Goodsir lets out an inhuman, whimpering, choked-off yelp of a weak creature who has no hope of being heard.

That’s when Crozier, who enjoyed the captain’s privilege of a separate dwelling, shared with nobody but Lady Silence, whose virtue he took upon himself to safeguard against the men, peaks into their hut. “Is he awake?”

Bridgens squeezes through their motley crew and pulls up the doctor’s eyelids; his pupils are blown wide, and do not respond to the light and stimuli.

“He’s fighting for it,” Bridgens says, and adds without much need, “I hope.”

Crozier bids them a goodnight for the second time this night, and retreats, leaving the men to it.

“You’d think Tuunbaq was on his tail,” Leys scowls at Goodsir.

“Maybe it is, Leys,” Bridgens says, wiping away hair from Goodsir’s sweaty brow. “We never know what the palaces of the minds of others contain.”

“Well, he’d better shut the doors of those them palaces then.”

Choosing to ignore further grumbling, Bridgens is surprised to see Goodsir calm down under his touch. As the men settle back into their sleeping bags again and begin to nod off, curling up and turning like large dogs making comfortable on cold ground, Bridgens switches sleeping places with Mr. Honey and lies down next to the doctor. He gingerly places a palm on his shoulder in the hope that the touch would bring comfort rather than reminders of past horrors. Usually hesitant to reach out lest the touch be misconstrued, he has avoided physical proximity unless warranted by his duties with the sick. Hopefully, none of his companions will judge him depraved enough to see something sinister into this; and yet, he is startled and taken aback by the tide of longing that rises in him at the touch, at the hint of body warmth through layers of clothing. He is not a solitary creature by nature, he thinks, biting his lip against the uncharacteristic desire to scream; he often imagined shared lodgings in London with Harry, _his_ Harry, the other Harry, the wrong Harry to die, imagined falling asleep and waking up together. Fate has decreed that he should live out his life alone, giving him nothing but this travesty in return.

Bridgens barely manages to slip off into a dark doze when the screaming starts up again, no less startling the second time, for the sleeping mind remembers not that the danger has passed. “Fer fuck’s sake,” someone mumbles with resignation. Bridgens grips Goodsir by the shoulders, hoping against hope that he can keep the man not even aware of his presence, except in the most perfunctory manner, afloat in the murky tide of nightmares flowing through his unconscious mind. His whimpering and thrashing eventually subsides. Not for long though.

After the fourth such episode, they give up sleep as a lost cause, Jopson wakes up Crozier in his separate captain’s hut, and they begin their day early. Going against the biting, freezing wind from the empty dark reaches of the Arctic, with heavier sleds, and on little to no rest too, is getting harder with each step. Obstacles that were barely worth noting not a full day ago are becoming more of a challenge. Taking notice of the general despondent mood, Crozier orders an early lunch of leftover weevil-ridden sea biscuits (ironic, Bridgens thinks, that these uninspiring but trustworthy victuals should nourish them long after the uninspired but trustworthy man who baked them was gone). 

This expedition has brought them more experience feeding unresponsive men than most get in a lifetime, and Bridgens fears how men might take to this additional challenge. He turns to check on Goodsir, only to see that although his pose has not changed, his eyes are now open. At being seen, Goodsir shudders as if struck with a whip.

“He’s awake!” Bridgens says quietly, frozen in place with overwhelming gratitude. Crozier, by his side in an instant, is less hesitant.

He pats the man on the shoulder and booms with genuine warmth, “Welcome back to the world of the living, Dr. Goodsir.”

Dr. Goodsir looks from one man to the next, indifferent to the degree that makes Bridgens remember Crozier’s fears about their doctor’s prospects, until his gaze alights on Lady Silence. At first, he beams with relief at her sight, but in a split second, his face contorts with guilt. He shrugs as if coming out of deep thought and says, “I’m not a doctor anymore. Please don’t call me that.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As per usual, Goodsir's experience at Hickey's camp (and the slightly different cast of dramatis personae therein) follows the book canon. 
> 
> (This chapter got waaay too long for my limited attention span, so if you see any unintentional offences against the English language, please tell me, and I'll correct them!)

Insofar as he gave it any thought at all, Bridgens assumed that Goodsir’s nightmares would pass once he regained consciousness; but he did, and they don’t. Pinning the thrashing screaming body to the ground to shield it both from the horrors within and from the stampeding men whose own fears are forcibly drawn out at being woken up in such a brutal manner, Bridgens has to check the uncharacteristic desire to squeeze Goodsir’s skull, and keep squeezing until it cracks, so he can see what was lurking inside.

(“I’m not a doctor anymore. Please don’t call me that,” Goodsir said.

Crozier clumsily kneeled by Goodsir’s sled to look him in the eyes, wincing at having to bend his barely healed leg. “Whatever you did, you had no other choice. You hear me? You did what it takes to live to be judged for it. And, for good or for ill, none of us are to be the judges of ourselves.”

Except prurient curiosity gnaws on them all, yet none have the courage to ask outright what was it that robbed him of sleep, and judge.)

“That’s Dr. Goodsir again,” Bridgens says, pitching his voice loud enough for it to cut through the clamour. “Pray calm down.”

“Mr. Pearson, please put the goddamned shotgun down, or I will have to take it away for safekeeping every evening,” Jopson barks, rather enjoying his new status as a lieutenant.

“I’d like to see you try,” Pearson grumbles, but complies.

How much longer before he doesn’t? Bridgens wonders. How much longer before someone fires into the dark, and more blood is spilled on an expedition that has seen too much as it is? How much longer before someone else snaps? Settling back by Goodsir’s side, Bridgens cannot bear to look at him, knowing that some of the anger he feels would inevitably shine through. It was Goodsir who persuaded him to relinquish what little dignity he could shepherd and cling to life like lichen on a barren shore, goading him by example, giving him faith that he, too, could persevere and not let his weaknesses have the upper hand, and that that would somehow suffice. Bridgens did his part helping the ill, many if not most of whom would have perished if abandoned alone at Rescue Camp, and, looking at the men, fallible, yes, and often feeble, yet alive, he no longer can bring himself to regret his survival. But then, why cannot Goodsir embrace his own tenets and soldier on? Physician, heal thyself indeed, Bridgens thinks, curling up and hoping that he would get some sleep before the screaming started again, but before he manages to doze off, a clammy, shaking palm covers his, cold as if it touched snow not a second ago. He holds his breath, waiting for the touch to end, to be revealed as an accident born of cramped quarters and darkness. Earlier that day, he saw Goodsir shy away from helping hands. Insisting on walking alongside the men, if only for a quarter hour at a time—if his shuffling along while hardly lifting his feet from the ground deserved the name of walking—the doctor often lost his balance, but whenever Crozier or Lady Silence rushed to support him, he flinched, as if small acts of kindness burned and hurt like a brand.

The memory makes a lump grow in his throat. Before he has time to reconsider, he turns his hand palm-up under Goodsir’s fingers, and squeezes the doctor’s hand with both of his. This does not need to be painless, he realizes, and neither does his gratitude need to be completely free of resentment and grief. It is this dark undercurrent, he suspects, that allows Goodsir not to shun his proximity, knowing that it would be undemanding; the doctor might be tempted to don a brave mask for Crozier or Lady Silence, but is past such vanities with Bridgens, whom he had seen at his weakest and most shameful. Listening to the wind outside and the snores of the men inside the hut, he holds firm onto the hand that grows gradually warmer under his touch. That is not enough, but he still cannot let go of the man reaching out to him over the chasm of whatever he did, was forced to do, or had done to him. 

*

Bridgens dreaded their next stop for the night, fearing his own reaction, his own and the men’s, more horrible than horror, heavier than death itself: the painful human vulnerability to the temptation of violence. Dread was never far from the surface of his consciousness, often breaking through the hypnotic, mind-numbing lull of pulling the sledge, and the solution, when it comes, is so simple that he almost laughs aloud. He’ll just have to build a separate ice hut to give the men half a chance at a good night’s rest, a small one, snug and faster to construct than the one housing the larger party, not unlike the one Crozier and Lady Silence repair to.

Bridgens takes inordinate amount of pride of his new skill, building the hut with minimal assistance from Lady Silence. He lays ice blocks in a spiral, in ever narrower circles, knowing just how much weight each layer can bear with an instinct of a man who has lived his life as a balancing act, knowing when not to push or lean too hard. He might be a tad disappointed that Goodsir showed now interest in the intricacies of ice hut building, but then, he knew that Goodsir was no longer the same man who enthusiastically hauled around pails with specimen early on in the expedition, and should not have expected that same exuberant curiosity. None of them were what they have been once, and he was a fool to expect otherwise. 

He carves out small ventilation windows and neatly mounts an overhang over the door: Lady Silence constructs elaborate tunnels for exits, but he has not mastered that trick yet. Should they face another winter on the ice, as they might, if the ever stiffer chill breathing down their necks is any indication, he will have plenty of time to perfect his technique. When he finishes patching all gaps and cracks in the hut with softer snow, Lady Silence comes to inspect his handiwork, and a small proud smile tugs at the corners of her lips.

“I had the best teacher,” he tells her, clasping his palms in front of his chest and hoping that she would understand his meaning from his tone, if not the exact words used to convey it.

He is still preening a little over a small fireplace in the middle of the hut when the next visitor enters this humble abode.

Alexander Pearson casts about the hut, bending his head low, and asks, “Do you intend to stay with him?” 

The answer does not come easy. He could say that he was never tempted to leave Goodsir alone in the freezing dark, but that would not be true. He knows he will miss the superficial comfort of large numbers, the wet animal smell of sweaty and waterlogged wool, the human sleeping noises that almost drown out the growls of ice outside. Finally, he nods his assent.

Pearson shrugs his shoulders, obviously unsurprised. “I expected no less.” The marine takes a step toward him and presses a dirty parcel about the size of a quarto into his hands. “Please take this, Mr. Bridgens, for my peace of mind.”

Bridgens carefully unwraps the oil-stained rag to reveal a two-shot pistol he didn’t even know Pearson possessed, despite having kept a reasonably close tally of the camp’s weaponry in the days preceding Hickey’s mutiny. Pearson moves fast to cover the gun up again.

“Please don’t brandish it like that. I’d rather Crozier nor his lapdog Jopson knew about it, just in case.”

“They are your captain and your lieutenant, and you would do well to show them respect,” Bridgens says automatically to avoid thinking about the implications of this gesture. For the first time, it dawns on him that Pearson might have been reaching for his shotgun at night not because he knew not what he was doing, but because he did, according to his own warped, almost obscene understanding. “Thank you, but there won’t be a need for it.”

Pearson leans so close that Bridgens can feel puffs of his breath on his skin, and whispers, “I saw bones in a pot in Hickey’s camp, bones of my friends. I know you didn’t want me to come, sir, for that very reason, and for that I’m grateful. My point is, we don’t know if Goodsir partook of it, and since we don’t, I’d rather not leave you at his mercy.”

“This is absurd,” he says, biding time.

“Aye, perhaps it is. I’ve never wanted to be wrong more than I do now, but if I’m not, we cannot stand to lose you if we want to get shot of this frozen hell. Nothing awaits Crozier in England, so if asked to choose between his Esquimaux wench and bringing us home, which one do you think he’d choose?”

“I will not hear you slander him, nor her.”

Pearson lets out a mirthless laugh. “What do you think they are doing, all alone in a freezing ice burrow? For a man your age, you can be surprisingly innocent.”

“What we will not survive, Mr. Pearson, is another mutiny, and if you-”

“Nothing could be farther from my meaning, sir. We’d just rather you lived to see the next dawn.”

His “we” rankles, a reminder that discontent is spreading through their diminished group like gangrenous rot. They cannot afford another winter in this icy land, Bridgens realizes, even with good hunting and fishing, which is never a certainty to begin with. Their minds will kill them, even if the climes don’t. “That would be all, Mr. Pearson,” he says, pressing the pistol back into his hands. They are racing against time.

He takes a moment to compose himself before seeking out Goodsir. He finds him poised on the outskirts of their small camp, a black splotch against the angry blur of white, a desolate ghost waiting to be invited in, but before he has a chance to approach the doctor, Lady Silence appears before him, her grey fur coat making her almost invisible in the early snow. Bridgens pauses, reluctant to interrupt their conversation, if it can be called that. Goodsir’s Inuktitut, insofar as Bridgens can gauge, remains positively Edenic—the only thing, possibly, that can be described as Edenic in this icy hell of their own making—in that it relies heavily on nouns, fit, that is, to name and to convey the original wonder and horror, but very little else. And Lady Silence, of course, has no choice but to let her actions speak for her. He watches her fingers dance through the air, twisting, he realizes, a length of string into shapes he could not possibly see at this distance. Before long, Goodsir, initially apprehensive, reaches out and touches the rapidly changing signs, either to learn them by touch, or to create his own. This gives Bridgens hope: that two people who should by right have no means of having a dialogue can huddle against the gathering dark to keep the flickering light of friendship alive, yes, but also that the Goodsir he knew, the restlessly curious and affable mind, was still in there somewhere.

Goodsir’s superficial agitation does not last long though, and by the time he settles on their slightly elevated sleeping place of ice blocks covered with sealskins and a large sleeping bag, alertness gives way to a weary stoop.

“Mr. Bridgens, could you warm some water for me?”

While Bridgens busies himself over the small fire without imposing on him with questions, Goodsir sighs and pulls off first his boots, then his dirty socks, revealing layers of bandages underneath.

The sight fills Bridgens with a sense of foreboding. Even the bulky bandaging does little to conceal the fact that the shape of Goodsir’s feet is obviously wrong, and besides, no blister could have issued that much blood. In their motley crew, worn down with lead sickness and bone-deep exhaustion, lurching steps do not draw that much attention. So many men would occasionally lose balance and topple that he never paused to think about the state of Goodsir’s feet, despite having seen his missing ear. Goodsir meanwhile pulls on the dressing and hisses through clenched teeth when it remains stuck.

“Patience, Dr. Goodsir,” Bridgens says in his practiced calm voice. “We’ll just let it soak a bit, and it will come off in no time.”

Crozier might have the moral duty to provide spiritual guidance to Goodsir; Bridgens’s duty is much more modest, consisting as it does of ensuring that the soul’s material vessel survives, but even an unassuming task should not be shirked. He places their small tin pot by Goodsir’s feet, and dabs a cloth first in the warm thawed water, then on the bandages. Testing the dressing cautiously, he catches himself crooning soft comforting nothings that Goodsir, having taught him his bedside manner to begin with, must recognize for the platitudes they are. Nevertheless, the doctor does not protest, knowing that they are as much for Bridgens’s peace of mind as for his own.

"We had a disagreement with Mr Hickey. Over dietary matters, largely," Goodsir says, almost apologetically, noticing how hard Bridgens is trying not to wince at the putrid smell of old blood.

"Who won?" he asks, just to stave off the silence.

"I rather stood my ground." His smile, uncharacteristically, is all teeth, which might be a lingering symptom of scurvy, but then, it might not. 

“It’s not as bad,” Goodsir begins to say when Bridgens finally pulls the bandages away, revealing the full extent of his wounds, only to finish feebly, “as all that.”

It’s not, Bridgens has to concur, in that it’s much worse. No strangers to frostbite and long treks in wet boots that could never be adequately dried, few members of the expedition are still in possession of all ten digits, but losing all ten seems excessive. At least there’s no smell of rotting flesh which he loathes to describe as familiar, but has to in order to stay truthful.

“You are a luminary on the firmament of the medical profession,” Bridgens says, swallowing hard. “Now let me help you.”

There must be no limit to Goodsir’s ingenuity as a doctor, nor his body’s stubborn will to survive, if he has gotten this far, with what little medicine he had at his disposal, without letting the wounds fester. The stumps are uneven, some as long as the first joint, some mere knolls where a finger once were, cauterized, no doubt, as competently as the circumstances allowed, but all covered in a thick scab of black dried blood. Bridgens does not like the look of the little finger on the right foot, where the wound must have reopened recently from the pressure of walking, but he cannot tell just how dire the situation is without washing off the blood first. He sits down by Goodsir’s feet, places one comfortably on his knees, and takes to work.

“They delighted in my degradation,” Goodsir says at the first insistent touch of the clean cloth, his voice hesitant and hoarse, as if having someone touch him with care and kindness has unsealed a well of hurt within.

Bridgens carefully avoids looking up, even when he feels Goodsir’s body start to shake, firmly placing a palm on his calf instead to still the trembling. “If you could just stay still- that’s a good boy.”

“They laughed, and they laughed, until they could barely breathe. I’ve never seen anything like it, and hope I never will. I told Silna-”

“Is that her name?” Bridgens asks, rinsing the cloth.

“Lady Silence? Yes. I told her, and told her again, that Englishmen were not like that, but life has made a liar of me, and I can’t bear to look her in the eye.”

“She can come to her own conclusions. Remember, you are an example of this breed too, and I would be hard-pressed to find one finer,” he says, bending over the mangled foot again.

There’s silence for a while, interrupted only by Goodsir’s belaboured breathing, until he finally says, “That’s where you are wrong, see. I killed Magnus Manson.” When Bridgens looks up sharply, Goodsir sets his teeth and nods. “And I don’t regret it.”

His tone makes the pronouncement hard to believe, but Bridgens decides that now is not the time to argue. He shrugs equivocally. “There are things which we should regret, and don’t. And vice versa.”

“I watched him die a slow death over the course of a month. He was strong, and it was not a good death. Crozier shot him. I knew that the bullet was lodged in his spleen or liver, and that he would not live without removal surgery, but insisted that it was just a flesh wound regardless. Do you think I can in all honesty describe myself as a doctor after that?” 

Magnus was well-liked: a simple man, little more than a child really, but kind, and never known to refuse help when it was asked of him. Bridgens regretted him coming under Hickey’s sway, and there was no man in Hickey’s camp he would mourn more. And yet, the needs of his patient take precedence. Turning Goodsir’s foot this way and that to take a closer look at it in the flickering light of their small fire, he makes himself say, “Hickey guided his hand, even if Magnus, God rest his soul, did not have the faculties to be malicious.”

He busies himself patting the foot dry as Goodsir continues. “Hickey bought him cheaply. Not for safety, not for the absence of hunger. For love. Ouch!”

His hand slips and presses too harshly on the unhealed wound at hearing that word in that grisly ambience. He says, his mouth suddenly bone-dry, “Just a second longer Dr. Goodsir, I’m almost done.” 

Bridgens is happy to note that some wounds are almost healed, and while others are still red-rimmed and hot to the touch, none have the telltale black veins that portend gangrene.

Goodsir sighs. “I wish you would call me Harry.”

Bridgens does pause to consider it, if not for long, imagines his mind conjuring up the ghost coming to answer the name every time, and shakes his head. “I’d rather not.”

He procures a small jar of petroleum jelly and generously slathers the stumps to make sure that they won’t stick to the dressing again before carefully bandaging them again.

“What would you call me then, knowing what you do now?” There’s honest, if malicious curiosity in Goodsir’s voice.

Bridgens sighs. “A man who would have a hard time reckoning with everything he did or did not do once he is safely ensconced in that green land of ours, and in that, you are no different from the rest of us. We should sleep, for we have a long day ahead of us.”

The next morning, Leys comes to his small hut and brings Bridgens braised seal meat for breakfast, a gesture in which gratitude for a good night’s rest, no doubt, mixes with much more sinister suspicions that he might have been killed in the silent predawn hours. Bridgens adds Leys to his list of potential mutineers and briefly regrets not taking Pearson’s pistol when offered, but decides not to press the matters further. He lets out a forced laugh instead. “With others taking over my duties as a steward, I’ll be out of the job before long. Have pity on my grey head.”

“It’s no inconvenience, Mr. Bridgens, sir.”

They pack their sleds with quiet practiced efficiency and press on, pausing only to hunt fowl whenever they spot some, rock ptarmigans and ducks, for hearty sea-pie is a welcome addition to their repetitive diet, and a great boost to the morale. The snow is softer here, wet and heavy, making the pulling harder as sleds sink deeper, but giving them hope that there still might be open leads along the coast. He doubts whether the men can support this pace for much longer. He doubts whether he himself can take it for much longer, tracking the comings and goings of all men, listening in to hushed whispers at the edge of hearing, making sure that the ones who have the most trouble walking take turns being hauled, and minding that they are only hauled for equal stretches of time. Worst of all, he doubts whether the weather will hold for much longer before it turns like a key in the lock of a crypt, sealing them in.

“You race as if all hordes of hell were chasing you,” Crozier tells him on one particularly exhausting walk when even Lady Silence, always quietly resolute, starts to look somewhat downcast. “Nothing awaits us on the shore. Only a whaler that has had a particularly unfortunate season would even consider staying out here until this late, and fewer still would take the risk.”

The unshared knowledge about the lurking danger weighs heavy on Bridgens, but since there is little that can be done about it, he decides to persevere in his reticence. He shrugs and says, not untruthfully, “This land makes me hungry for miracles.” It has given them some, after all, if unwillingly, as a hound forced to give up a marrowbone.

“Hope kills,” Crozier says in between huffs. They are ascending what seems to be the downwind side of a small ridge, sinking deep into untrodden snow.

“So does its absence,” Goodsir adds.

Bridgens squints at the horizon as they crest the ridge, taking the measure of a plane ostensibly no different from the one that brought them here, and then his legs give out.

“Tell me what you see,” he says, afraid of raising his voice.

"Thalatta, thalatta," Dr. Goodsir extends a hand to him as he echoes “The sea, the sea,” and helps him to get up. There’s a dark stretch of water winding towards the horizon, except their group is too weak for exulting cries, throwing a huge heap of stones as a trophy, or whatever else their predecessors did in _Anabasis,_ which robs the moment of an appropriately solemn air but does not dispel their jubilation altogether. "Shall we?"

And thus they shamble to the shore, two men holding each other up for comfort, and Bridgens is shaking so hard that tears are rattled out of his eyes. Two years or more after he had first advocated the plan, they reach Fury Beach. It takes them another half-day’s walk to find the boats left by Ross’s expedition, and they seem seaworthy, or almost.

“Barely even leaks,” George Chambers announces with joy and pride after they lower one into the lead.

They have barely enough caulking supplies to waterproof all three rowboats, and only one caulking iron to boot, which means that only one man can work at a time, and that slows their endeavour down not inconsiderably. They choose to start with the rowboat that raises the most concerns.

“Where’s Mr. Hickey when you happen to need him?” Mr. Honey says, studiously driving oakum into the boat’s seams, but the joke falls decidedly flat.

Despite the empty horizons resolutely unwilling to yield a sail or even the barest hint of a ship, and the encroaching darkness that falls earlier with each passing day, and the wet cold wind licking at their very bones, Bridgens knows that he will remember those days as they happiest on the journey, or of the last leg of it, he amends. This is the first time in a long, long while when he finds himself capable of imagining a future from which to remember their road. 

One morning, lulled by the warmth and the steady sleeping breathing of a body next to him, he even wakes up with a cock-stand, which he does not remember occurring in a long while, and it is not until several blissful seconds later that he remembers: they are several months into the world with no Harry Peglar in it. Eventually the pain will mould from that of an open wound to one of an old bruise, a moment he yearns for and dreads in equal measure, knowing that it will mark his Harry’s final departure from the mortal coil. He shifts in the sleeping bag, turning to face away from the wrong Harry lest his mortification becomes apparent. To his surprise, he is not past being fleetingly proud of this proof of his virility, which has survived all the physical hardships he has endured on the way, but he does breathe a sigh of relief when the bulge subsides.

When Dr. Goodsir finally wakes up, Bridgens dares to ask the question that has been nagging at the back of his mind for far too long. “When a ship comes- What are we to do about Lady Silence?”

Goodsir guffaws. “You are a fool if you believe that she is not strong-willed enough to decide for herself.” For a moment, he stays silent, rubbing at the contours of his smile under his beard, and then continues, “She’s young, inquisitive, and infatuated, so I would bet good money on her following Crozier. Misery makes strange bedfellows, but that does not preclude love from sneaking in. God, I wish you could see your expression, Mr. Bridgens. Your power of observation is no match to your intelligence.”

He indulgently pats Bridgens on the back, and, unused to such carefree, if not outright careless contact, he dissolves into a fit of giggles. “I hope so,” he finally says through chortles, “for else I would be an idiot.” To Bridgens, and to many painfully introspective men, as well as men who dread being seen, remembering that he could watch and not just be watched did not come naturally, but this just might be his most staggering failure of observation to date. “I fear I owe an apology to some of the men, whom I have scolded for spreading malicious rumours,” he says, and Goodsir’s laugh sounds genuinely happy.

It is on their ninth or tenth day on the shore that Mr. Honey, who, feet or no feet, has the sharpest eyes in the entire party, yells, “There’s a sail!”

“No,” Crozier says, but, after briefly looking to Lady Silence and reading something from her inscrutable face, nods. “Yes.”

The camp dissolves into a flurry of movement. While the fitter men try to push the rowboats into the water and throw what little of their possessions they still cherish inside, others gather up all the powder they have to try and make a signal.

“The ship’s leaving,” Crozier observes, not caring to join either group.

No matter how assiduously they poke at it with Lucifer matches, wet powder sputters and dies with nary a puff.

“We’ll just have to row faster then,” Pearson barks, throwing out all pretence of respecting the hierarchy, and Bridgens cannot help but nod.

“This is madness,” Crozier sneers. “We don’t know if there are open leads all the way to the whaler. Hopes do not command the condition of the ice, any more than they fill empty stomachs.”

“Staying here through the winter promises no feasts either,” Leys interjects.

Ignoring the grumbling of the men, Crozier turns on his heels to face Bridgens. “Do you know with certainty that the lead will take you all the way to the whaler?”

Bridgens hangs his head. “You know I don’t.”

“Then you are taking the men to their deaths. Do you know with certainty that none of the rowboats will spring a leak?”

This has been a matter of some discussion, with no conclusive evidence either way, so he has to admit again, “You know I don’t.”

“Then you are taking the men to their deaths.”

“Death is all around us,” Bridgens says. “I know that, if we set up camp here, we are as dead as if we plunged into the cold water right this second. Mr. Pearson, would you please lower the gun.”

When Crozier wheels around, he looks down the barrels of the two-shot pistol.

Pearson sounds much calmer than his pose implies. “Not before the damn boats are on the water, and we are in them, with or without him.”

This almost, but not quite forces Bridgens to argue the position he opposed not a minute before. He settles for saying, “He’s the captain,” as he moves to stand between Crozier and the cocked pistol. 

“With all due respect, Mr. Bridgens, sir, you nursed us to health, while he was ready to hand in his resignation and abandon ship a long time before it became necessary.”

“If you think _I_ never thought of wandering off into the bergs and leaving you all-”

“Well you didn’t, did you?” 

Bridgens prided himself on being invisible, which suited both his job and his predisposition, and he feels naked and vulnerable, a snail out of its shell, with all the gazes suddenly directed at him.

“Yeah, that’s the rub, innit?” Chambers joins in. “One of you wants us alive, and, God knows, you have your caprices, sir, you packed two dozen books when you told us to pack only the necessities-”

“Thirty two books, actually,” Leys interrupts, and adds with barely contained pride, “I counted them myself.” 

Bridgens would be tempted to congratulate him, knowing just how hard numbers were for the young marine, if he did not grow cold at his next phrase, “What we are saying, sir, is, you just nod, and we’ll knock him on the head and dump him in the closest pollen.”

“Polynya, not pollen, you dimwit,” Mr. Honey mouths.

“Pollen, polynya, same difference.”

“We will not have another mutiny. We have had quite enough for one expedition, thank you very much,” Bridgens says, and hears a recognizable soft chuckle from the edge of the group where Goodsir is standing. “Let us pretend we have heard nothing in this last couple of minutes. All men to the boats in ten minutes.”

Meanwhile, Goodsir pulls Crozier aside and whispers urgently, “There are fates worse than ignominy and a court-martial, and we’ve faced many of them already. Your conduct as our commander was beyond reproach.”

Bridgens does not want to shame the man by listening further, and busies himself with dividing their beggarly possessions and the capable men between the boats. It is impossible, he knows, as they set the boats afloat. They will have to come back, exhausted and dispirited, and that might spell their doom in the looming, creeping dark. In the worst case, they might not even live to return to this small camp, because a rowboat springs a leak, or because the ice closes behind them, cutting them off from the shore. Besides, who knows what dark wonders lurk under thin ice, magnificent and ever so hungry.

“I wish I knew I was not damning us all,” he says when Dr. Goodsir comes to stand by him.

“There’s no telling that, but it was an honour knowing you,” Dr. Goodsir says.

“To the oars!” comes the shout from the first boat.

Bridgens is the last to get into the boat. It is probably true that nothing awaits Crozier in England, but is the land that would have him dead for loving who he loves, and likely destitute in his last years despite a lifetime of service, any more generous to him?

Dr. Goodsir, already in the boat, reaches out to him to help him over the ravenous sliver of icy water.


	5. Chapter 5

It has snuck up on him unnoticed, and was very short indeed, but there’s no denying it: there was also a time when he fancied himself in love with Dr. Goodsir, and he chose the worst possible moment to realize it.

Goodsir leans protectively over his gruesome reliquary, as if fearing that Bridgens might snatch it away. Under his fingers Bridgens can see small bones, some no larger than a wishbone, all carefully affixed to the bottom of a wooden box that used to hold his drawing supplies, and meticulously signed. _R. Strickland, os lacrimale,_ he reads, and feels tears prickle at his eyes. _G. Dunn, os capitate._ And then his gaze falls on two small bones signed _HDS Goodsir, phalanges distales,_ and his breath catches in his throat. There’s something obscene about this baring of that which should, by all rights, remain hidden, more obscene than lavish displays of supple pliant flesh. He tries to avert his eyes, but cannot, not at first, and when he finally looks up at Goodsir, he is overcome with the guilty, possessive, hungry gratitude for his survival, not tempered, for once, with questioning why this one survived while that one didn’t. There is triumph, dignity and glory in the insistent fleshly presence of this body, alive to feed, breathe, secrete, excrete, sleep, and rejoice in the fact that it pleases the eyes to see the sun, and that is enough, if only for this second. He is almost overpowered by the sudden desire to lean in and breathe in the air Goodsir breathes out, but checks himself, and then thinks quietly, oh. Oh, this is what will become of it.

He takes a couple of deep breaths to make sure that his voice doesn’t shake before he forces a smile and says, “I pity the church consigned to these for its holy relics.”

Dr. Goodsir’s fingers flutter over the bones as he begins to explain, "We know about all manner of monsters and creatures by their bones. These men will be known by theirs. Someone will look at them once, in a museum or an engraving, and say, 'They lived.'"

 _W. Orren, os cuneiforme,_ he reads, and thinks of Persian cuneiform writing, long lines of signs as legible as birds’ footprints in the sand: the greatest minds of the era struck dumb by their descendants’ damnable forgetfulness.

“ _Someone will remember us, I say. Even in an age unlike our own,_ ” he finally quotes, and adds: “Sappho was referring to the depth of passion that transcends time itself rather than the perseverance of bones, I’m afraid.”

“I know.” Goodsir smiles a rueful smile that makes something ravenous inside Bridgens’s chest yearn and keen.

In his twenties, Bridgens liked to think of himself as Hamlet, plagued by too many thoughts to stoop to action; in his excuse, he can only say that he was too young and sheltered to recognize utter bollocks. _You cannot call it love; for at your age the hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble, and waits upon the judgment_? If only, he thinks, and adds, what a bunch of ostentations, unrepentant, boastful hogwash.

This is akin to the pins and needles in a waking limb, he tells himself, or the sudden tingling itch on the skin exposed to icy winds once you come back into the warmth: his capacity for feeling coming back to life, and latching onto the first possible object, no matter how unsuitable, with the undiscerning hunger of a suckling babe. _Still life, O grief! O shame! in me prevails_ , that is all, he thinks, commending himself for committing the lines to memory, all those years ago, for future use, even if his preferences at the time lay with the ribald tales of Boccaccio rather than the melancholy Petrarch mourning his half-imagined lover. It need not become an inconvenience.

And yet, against his better judgment, he keeps worrying at the cumbersome feeling the way one licks and pokes at the wound from a freshly pulled out tooth. He casts about, looking for the exact moment when love secretly took up his bow again, as if pinning it down might unravel this flimsy veil. When they were rowing after a retreating whaler through a meandering maze of open leads and the setting dark, their oars growing heavier with ice and certainty that their goal was as unattainable as Eldorado, did he already look to Goodsir with the eyes of a man in the thrall of infatuation? Did he, when a boat rowed out to meet them, and they were saluted with three cheers? Did the kernel of this risible, untimely passion already lie in wait, like a seed sown in fertile soil, when their miserable, wretched company scattered across the ship like so many autumn leaves? Or, for that matter, during the divine service to celebrate their deliverance, when he felt Goodsir place a supportive hand on his shoulder almost before he felt his knees begin to quake? He never thought of himself as a passionless man, but he believed he was not given to the kind of passion that disturbed the mind unduly and inspired grand proclamations. He always believed his fare more modest, by inclination as much as by necessity; until Harry, that is, his Harry.

Goodsir blithely commandeers them a small bunkroom on board the steam-boat taking them to Hull, a coffin of a two-berther of the sort usually shared by warrant officers, where putting up a folding writing table means that both of the room’s occupants need to be seated on their beds, and if one bends over the shaving table, the other has to either stay on the bunk or else huddle against the sliding door to allow his mate some space. Proximity makes touching inevitable and inconspicuous—a hint of warmth at the press of another body through layers of clothing as Goodsir squeezes past him, or accidentally brushing elbows when writing—but, with the way Bridgens's body is quick to yearn for more, these instances, barely worth noticing as such, make him feel like a thief.

When he passes Goodsir his shaving kit and their fingers touch, he barely has time to steel himself against the familiar prickle of guilt when Goodsir raises his gaze, meets his eyes, and very decisively runs his fingers along Bridgens’s hand, making an accidental encounter into anything but. 

"Please tell me if the liberties are unwarranted,” Goodsir says, his soft Edinburgh accent becoming more pronounced as he slips into an agitated patter. “If so, you have my sincere apologies, and I hope you will be kind enough to pay no further heed to this indiscretion. Am I horribly wrong in presuming you would not mind?"

If he is not wrong, he is not altogether right either, Bridgens realizes, much to his own consternation. Wallowing in his solitary guilty fancies, he never once paused to consider what Goodsir might want. Goodsir’s passions, such as they were, seemed to run towards microscopic organisms; ostensibly, he was just the sort to obligingly marry his professor’s daughter, and joyfully, if absent-mindedly produce a small brood of inquisitive and boisterous children. The assertive press of his fingers against Bridgens’s wrist, the sensitive spot where his lifeblood pulses in an erratic rhythm, if not unwelcome, feels like an incursion onto the lands he used to treat as his, and only his own. And, most shamefully of all, he feels a stirring of pitying disdain at seeing what he resents in himself in the man he loves, but he cannot bear to begrudge him.

“It is a hanging offence,” Bridgens says, to win time.

Goodsir seems to honestly consider it, leaning his head to the side like a large affable dog. At last, he says, much in the way he would summarize an important scientific discovery, “Lashing at most, you are too valuable a steward to waste.”

“We both know that my stewarding days are over.”

“Are we going to argue technicalities?” The tip of Goodsir's ear blushes rose red, and that is the only indication of the seriousness of his intentions.

"Harry-" he says, and freezes, his tongue tripping over the word that once was as easy as breathing, easier even, and just about as indispensable.

Goodsir cuts him off before he can manage to say anything else. “I hope to God it’s the vocative case rather then the beginning of a sentence.”

“Oh Harry.”

“Hell’s teeth,” Goodsir grumbles and, closing half a step distance between them, covers Bridgens’s lips with his. Their teeth bump; Goodsir leans back for a second with a quiet laugh, and rubs the tip of his nose against Bridgens’s. A growl escaping his throat, Bridgens tangles his fingers in the curls at the back of Goodsir’s head, and pulls him closer, running his tongue against his chapped lips, then pushing in. Goodsir opens his mouth like a man dying of thirst, finally offered a drink of clear water. Bridgens can feel a bulge where their hips touch; Goodsir thrusts against him, vigorous and sloppy, and smiles against his lips.

“Let us spare you some work with cleaning the breeches,” Goodsir – Harry – whispers, and busies himself undoing the buttons first of his trousers, then of his drawers. He pushes them down his hips, then frowns, catching Bridgens’s expression. “Oh please, don’t let’s make a scene, it’s disagreeable enough without your sorrowful face.”

Disagreeable might be one way of putting it, Bridgens thinks. Another features rather more violence towards the man who should count himself lucky to be dead, really, because Bridgens, although not a violent man by nature, is endowed with an active imagination that could be put to finding new and rather inventive ways of hurting him.

“The circumcision is Hickey’s doing, I assume?” he whispers back, his voice hoarse with rage.

“You assume correctly, but the less is said about it, the better.”

There’s a jagged, angry red scar, certainly more fresh than any Bridgens has seen, circling Harry’s foreskin, or what’s left of it. Hesitatingly, he reaches to trace it, but Harry gently moves his hand away.

“I’m not yet done figuring out what feels good now, so it’d be better if I did it myself. We are in the uncharted waters, as it were,” he says with a bashful smile.

“You are safe now,” Bridgens says, pressing his cheek to Harry’s, and adds, although nobody could promise that, not ever, “It will be alright.”

“I know,” and he can feel a smile in Harry’s voice. “Now, are you absolutely sure we should just stand here all night?”

He reaches down and cups Bridgens, confident and curious, and his member grows at the touch of those deft fingers that saved so many. Thrusting into the welcoming hand, he briefly wonders at the fact that the body still likes what it likes, and is alive to do so, and then he wonders at nothing at all, enjoying the unthinking, uncomplicated contentment of their congress. He’s almost at the brink of spending before he catches himself forgetting Harry’s needs yet again.

“Are you familiar with the term Oxford rub?”

Harry’s tone is full of mock indignation. “Oh please, I’m from Edinburgh, not the Hebrides.”

“Clearly, a man of the world then.”

He rifles in their medical kit, rattling jars and bottles, instruments and implements, his fingers clumsy and slippery with sweat, until Harry moves to help him locate the recalcitrant jar of petroleum jelly.

“To think that we brought it all the way from England-,” he shakes his head, opening the jar. “Let’s make sure it is gone before we set foot on shore.”

At that, Bridgens cannot not kiss him, and then not kiss him some more for good measure, and card his fingers through his hair to make sure that anyone who takes one look at his locks would immediately think, here’s the man who’s been thoroughly debauched. His body, last touched to be mutilated, debased and ridiculed, deserves more than this hasty sordid assignation with their drawers barely pulled down their hips, but what he deserves is not what he needs, and if he needs a reminder of his body’s capacity for pleasure rather than pain, than Bridgens certainly should not deny him. 

He somehow did not expect Harry’s joyous, contagious curiosity to extend to this area of life too, but there are many things he did not expect, but ended up welcoming. Before dipping his hands into petroleum jelly, he drags his thumbs across Harry’s nipples through his shirt, and prays that his startled happy face stays in his memory forever, as a safeguard against darker days to come. Later, he thinks; later, when they have more privacy than a small bunkroom with inadequate sliding doors can afford, he’ll take his time, he’ll compile a map of all the sensitive spots on this long lean body, a map so thorough it will put all the coastal maps issued by the Discovery Service to shame. For now, this will have to do. He turns Harry around and generously slathers his inner thighs with petroleum jelly, palming the heavy weight of his balls until they tighten, the man responding to the touch with grateful greed. When Bridgens’s fingers linger a moment over his hole, part teasing, part probing, he bucks into the touch.

“Not now,” Bridgens mouths against the nobs of his spine, and, pressing his thighs together, drives his cock in between them, sliding against coarse hairs and soft skin. When his cockhead punches against the back of Harry’s balls, the man looks back over his shoulder with wonder in his eyes.

“This is good,” Harry whispers, and Bridgens feels his hand’s movements on his cock grow less hesitant, “so are you.”

Bridgens’s palm slithers underneath Harry’s shirt, feels the muscles on his stomach flutter. With the other hand, he holds Harry’s hips firmly in place as he ruts between them, the pressure first not enough, and then, all too soon, too much, all the sensations in his body focusing on the one spot with an intensity that verges on painful. When the movements of Harry’s arm become frantic and he freezes, his thighs quivering around Bridgens’s member, that pushes him over the edge.

For a while, they just stand there, panting hard. Bridgens awkwardly hugs Harry from behind, taking care not to touch his shirt with his greasy hands, and wishes there was a devil he could sell his soul to for the moment to stay awhile; but discretion dictates they should not become too careless.

"Well, this is an affront to my professional dignity as a steward," he says, inspecting an off-white wet spot on Harry’s sleeve.

Harry starts to laugh first, but it does not take him more than a second to join in.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 19K words and tons of gratuitous angst and literary allusions later, what was supposed to be a quick 5K PWP is finally done, yay! Thank you so much once again to all those who read along, and made this adventure so much more fun <3

_...there is a last_  
_even of last times_  
 _last times of begging_  
 _last times of loving_

Samuel Beckett

 

 

 _Lat. 51°-29' N., Long. 0°-0' W._  
_London, May, 1854._  
 _A reception at the Arctic Society_

 

"Mr. Pearson's account of your ill-fated expedition mentioned a giant bear-like creature, dwarfing regular polar bears like a wolf dwarfs a lapdog. He called it ‘an ice demon,’ I believe, and wrote that he could never reconcile it with the scientific knowledge of our era.”

Bridgens recognizes the speaker as one Mr. Manson, a journalist and a shipworm gnawing on the hull of the lost vessels of Franklin’s expedition. He poked relentlessly at the festering darkness between the reports that never matched up to his satisfaction, and could have been a danger, if not for his meagre standing and even more meagre talents. Bridgens never tried to establish whether the man was any relation to their Magnus Manson, for there wasn’t much to gain from the answer, aside from quite a lot of uncomfortable choices. And yet, despite his better judgment, he takes a step closer to Dr. Goodsir, the better to hear his answer.

"The account mentioned many things, and described yet more at great length,” Goodsir says with a slight incline of his chin, an acknowledgment and a warning. Bridgens is not used to hearing steel in his voice, or at least he never heard it directed at himself, and the reminder of the growing chasm between the man he knows and the man Goodsir has become rankles, more than it should.

Any man with a whit of common sense would have backed down at the tone, out of desire to avoid making a scene if nothing else, but the journalist persists. “Was there any truth in it?”

“I do not for a moment doubt that Mr. Pearson believed the veracity of his tale with utmost conviction.”

At some point since their last meeting, Dr. Goodsir has taken to walking with a cane, Bridgens notes, whether as a foppish affectation or to compensate for reduced balance that came with losing his toes is hard to tell. Now he knocks the cane impatiently against the side of his shoe. Bridgens wonders if anybody else notices the white-knuckled grip on the head of the cane. Bridgens wonders if anybody else cares, only to immediately castigate himself for the presumption, for he himself relinquished the right to care, or to inquire.

“And yet, coincidences like this invite certain conclusions,” Mr. Manson says, weaselling his way into an empty circle around Dr. Goodsir. “One member of the expedition describes a creature too strange to be believed. Another takes to studying antediluvian creatures that, who knows, might still roam the farther reaches of the earth. Who knows if the dark creatures of the past, as it were, might still be present.”

There is a long pause in which Dr. Goodsir, never a formidable man, straightens, tilts his head back as if scrutinizing a slightly unsavoury specimen that nevertheless poses a curious scientific conundrum, and becomes, to Bridgens’s eyes at least, something quite magnificent.

In a soft voice that becomes stronger with each word, he says, " _We_ are of the past, don’t you see. There’s no other historical darkness now, just us men. That includes us, the men of the Discovery Service, us, the lapdogs to the Admiralty. Us, who plunge onwards blindly to expand this stretch of land over which the sun never sets.” This is not the Dr. Goodsir he knew, Bridgens realizes. But he wants to know him, more than he allows himself to want most things. “Before long, our heroics and our ideals and our ideas would seem quaint oddities at best, as exotic as the bones of large animals evolved to thrive in the forests that had long turned into coal in the crucibles of time, and were then burnt again to come back as the pea-soupers that haunt our cities. And at worst… at worst, they would seem criminal."

Bridgens wants to know if Goodsir needs the cane, or just likes the heft of it. He wants to know what Goodsir is without the shadow of death hanging over him, and what he could yet become.

"You don't seem to hold much faith in mankind," Mr. Manson says, backing down a step.

"To the contrary, it is my faith in it that dictates my words. And now, if you’ll excuse me-"

Goodsir cuts through the crowd like a knife passes through butter, listeners stepping aside to let him go, and Bridgens cannot help but follow the lonely dark figure with his eyes. Some years ago, love, untimely and unwanted, opened Bridgens up like a knife opens a can of sardines, baring the sharp edges. Their delirious, frantic weeks on board the steamboat to England, so unbefitting men of their stature or age, might have been helpful in easing their passage back to the world of the living, but it had to stop. The ease with which he opened up, took to calling Dr. Goodsir Harry, and welcomed him as a part of his life gave him the worst hangover he ever had, and it was too much for him to stand at the time. At the very least, he thinks, he owes an apology, but the crowd has already closed after Goodsir, cutting off his route.

This was a mistake, he thinks. Coming here; also, running away before that. He looks at indifferent faces, the ones he recognizes and the ones he doesn’t, and all he sees are the hungry ghosts of their unburied dead. Others were judged more worthy, pushing an impossible hundred miles farther into the ice, past calving bergs and the things prowling in the dark. In the history books, they will be a footnote in minuscule type, or an embarrassed omission. And yet, none live in the historic tense, historical present being a cheap ploy to keep the stories that have run their course alive, as if in a magic lantern. For everything else, there’s the quagmire of the present, immediate and sharp and inescapable, he thinks, before realizing that he’s trying to forcefully extricate himself from the crowd.

The crowd seems to grow denser with each step he takes, but then, something was always in the way, and always will be, he thinks, grudgingly flinging excuses left and right as he proceeds. He knocks someone’s glass over. He steps on more toes than he did in his entire life, making up for a lifetime of treading carefully. He ignores several friendly greetings, and more than several angry stares. He is so lost in thought that he almost crashes into the man who steps into his trajectory. It takes an effort to recognize their sickly, gangly Davey Leys in the burly, bearded, beaming figure in front of him. There’s no telling the measure of a man until there are six feet of dirt piled atop him, Bridgens thinks with a disbelieving smile: Leys, who was probably spared the worst of their misadventure by dint of remaining almost catatonic after an early encounter with their predator from the ice, barely stepped on the English shore before enlisting on the next Arctic expedition, a one more successful this time.

Right as Bridgens stretches out a hand for a perfunctory handshake, Leys pulls him into a bear hug, natural on the ice, where protocol was often suspended, but very extravagant indeed in these more formal quarters.

“Good to see you, Mr. Bridgens,” he booms without letting him go. “Granted, would have been even better to have you with us, for reading, and them lectures, and all. It was so boring at times that I missed Franklin’s endless sermonizings, God rest his soul. Whenever he started up, you knew it was your Sunday spoken for. Remember those?”

As Leys chuckles, Bridgens cannot help but wonder: does it really take this short a time for their ill-fated expedition to be dissected into amusing anecdotes? Ten dozen men go into the ice, less than two dozen come out: even the sound of it smacks of absurdity. Is there something inherently wrong with him then if he insists on clinging to the bitter memories while others, having suffered no less, if not more, have managed to chart a new and happier course for themselves without dwelling unnecessarily on the past?

“Congratulations on finding the Northwest Passage,” he says with as much sincerity as he can muster, trying to untangle himself from the insistent hug.

“Well, traversable it might be, but not practicable for trade.” Leys shrugs his shoulders dismissively, almost crushing several of his ribs in the process. “There go all our grand plans. Anyway, I’ve been nattering on. How are you doing here on shore?”

After a moment’s pause, Bridgens settles on the truthful answer. “Uneventful, but sometimes uneventful is just what you need. Excuse me, now’s not a good time.”

He hopes Leys doesn’t take offence when he finally slips out of his grasp and presses onwards. In any case, there will be time to set the record straight later. He stands up on tiptoe in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the familiar curly-haired head over the shoulders of the crowd, but sees nothing. That does not have to mean anything though, for he no longer has the eyes of a young boy surveying the seas from the crow’s nest, so he stubbornly ploughs on in the direction he saw Goodsir disappear in.

He doesn’t get more than a few steps farther before someone catches his sleeve rather emphatically. Hoping against hope, he turns on his heels, but all he sees is Mr. Honey. He would have been overjoyed to see him under almost any other circumstances, just not at this particular moment, when with each passing moment his trek starts to look more like one of those nightmares in which you try to run after some unimaginable yet infinitely alluring goal on legs of lead, as all doors slam shut in your face.

“Mr. Bridgens, just the man I hoped to see!”

“Yes,” he says rather brusquely, fleeting regret instantly dissolved in the more pressing, vintage guilt he seeks to assuage at the moment.

The decidedly unfriendly greeting does little to deter Mr. Honey as he starts to rifle through the inner pockets of his jacket.

“My sister is a fossil-hunter, rather a promising one, if I say so myself. I was hoping you could pass her drawings on to Dr. Goodsir-”

Bridgens cuts him off. “I have not seen him to speak to for four years, if not more.”

Mr. Honey’s face appears more startled by the pronouncement than hurt by his rudeness. “But you were such great friends. Both being the bookish type, and all.”

Feeling the blush creep up his neck, Bridgens thinks, but does not say, that it was rather the “and all” part that posed the problem. He casts about for a more suitable explanation, but fails; not that the one he has makes much sense in retrospect. The silence stretches.

“I’ll take that off you,” says a familiar voice from behind him right as the pause is about to teeter over from awkward to peevish. “Thank you, Mr. Honey. The findings in Essex seem rather promising- that’s where your family is from, right?”

Goodsir’s excellent memory proves enough to mollify Mr. Honey, who departs with a smile and a hasty “I’ll leave you to discuss your latest book subscriptions, or whatever it is that you learned men talk about,” but not before pressing a hefty package of papers into Goodsir’s hands, as if fearing that the doctor might rescind his offer.

Raising his gaze from the papers, Dr. Goodsir shakes his head slightly. “Please don’t run away, Mr. Bridgens- John.”

“I was looking for you,” Bridgens says sheepishly.

“Not for the last four years you weren’t.”

“No, only now,” he says, and adds after a pause, “God, I made an arse of myself, didn’t I?”

Goodsir forces a smile, the merest shadow of the ones that could make the entire world appear somewhat brighter, if only for a moment. “You did, quite.”

“I believe I owe you an apology,” he says, right as Goodsir says, “If we could maybe take this somewhere less crowded-”

Bridgens bursts out laughing first, and cannot stop, undignified and breathless and too loud, but Goodsir joins him, which makes it alright, surprised glances and rude stares be damned. He forgot this, he thinks; how could he forget how much, and how effortlessly they laughed together, even when there was nothing to laugh about, even when they had nothing left but laughter?

"I ran away because I have loved him my whole life," he says when they get a hansom cab, and then remembers the address Goodsir gave the driver. “You have a house in Mayfair?"

“A very modest one," Goodsir says, having the decency to sound slightly embarrassed. "And I still sometimes dream of waking up in that igloo. In any case, he wasn't even born for the first twenty-something years of your life, and it was another twenty or so before you met, so that hardly qualifies as ‘a whole life,’ does it?"

Bridgens knows that he should be saying precisely none of this, but does, regardless. "I taught him to read, and he taught me to trust, and I don't have my whole life anymore. To exchange that for whatever I have left seemed profligate.”

"For a very smart man, you are a fool," Goodsir says, looking out of the window into the civilized London darkness outside.

“I know,” he says, reaching out to cover Goodsir’s hand with his. There’s hesitation in the way Goodsir freezes under the touch, but then the cab stops, putting an end to the awkward moment. As they leave the cab, Bridgens adds, more to himself than to Goodsir, “Trust me, I know.”

There’s nothing modest about Dr. Goodsir’s house, or so it seems to Bridgens, momentarily ashamed by how paltry any offering of his—an apology, or the arrogant hope for more—are due to look in comparison with this life well lived, and well ordered.

“My valet took off with no notice—I believe there was some sort of muddle involved—so it’s just the two of us. I’m afraid I cannot offer much, but my drinks cabinet, at least, is well-stocked. Crozier is still a teetotaller, but he takes curating my cabinet as a point of pride,” Goodsir says rather too fast as he leads the way to the library, small but well-appointed.

“I hear it was largely your testimony that marked the difference between Crozier keeping his rank and not,” Bridgens says as they ceremoniously toast over the table littered with hastily scribbled notes riddled with inkblots. This, at least, has not changed: Goodsir’s hand was always much too slow for his thoughts.

Goodsir laughs a startled little laugh that makes Bridgens’s heart skip a beat. “I don’t think he has ever fully forgiven me for it. I have never seen a man more intent to be stripped of rank in my entire life.”

“Do you ever see him then?” Bridgens asks, surreptitiously glancing at framed drawings hanging on the walls. He recognizes some of the species, and Goodsir’s drawing style, despite the passage of years.

“Whenever I fear that my Inuktitut is getting too rusty. Silna is ridiculously proud of their garden. She has the most amazing curiosity for the most banal things, as if she discovered the land herself.”

Bridgens nods and says, trying, but not altogether succeeding in keeping a straight face, “You could say that, insofar as we can claim discovering the lands long settled by peoples that are not English.”

Goodsir lets out another bashful laugh. “Yes, I guess you could indeed say that. And their little ones are a delight, if not quite as obliging of my mispronunciations as Silna.”

As the night wears on and the level of whisky in the decanter grows low while they exchange safe reminiscences and companionable silences that stretch ever longer, Bridgens, always a staunch believer in the Dutch courage, in the absence of all other sorts, realizes that he is just biding time, and has been for quite a while. The fact that Goodsir invited him here at all, never mind letting him overstay, by a significant margin, the time when all polite guests bid their farewells and hasten home, leads him to believe that his advances would not be altogether unwelcome, but it still takes all his bravery and strength, and then some from the cache he never knew he possessed, to speak up, which makes him lose all finesse.

“I want you in me,” he says before he can think better of it, carefully placing his glass on the table with more concentration than the action should require. “I want you, if you’ll have me.”

Despite his best efforts, the glass clinks inelegantly on the mahogany, and when he hastens to put it down again, more softly this time, it leaves a sloppy wet circle on the polished surface. In this, too, he has made a mess of things.

He does not look up when he hears Goodsir get up from his chair. He does not look up as a glass is deposited on the mantelpiece, the screech of cut glass against marble an offence to his ears, nor when Goodsir cautiously approaches him.

There’s a soft chuckle right above him, a huff of breath warming his balding pate. “Well, as fate would have it, I need a new valet, for one. The position of a valet is as good an excuse as any for comings and goings at odd hours.”

At that, he cannot help but look up with a start. He offered a quick tumble; Goodsir is offering him a life, a gift too magnanimous and much too large to fit. “I’m a petty officers’ steward, not a London valet. My skills run towards darning frozen slops, not dressing preeminent scientific minds to impress polite society. And even those skills, such as they were, are half a decade out of practice, mind you.”

“How much harder can it be?” Goodsir asks with the blithe disregard of a person never once tasked with making unwilling and obstinate subjects look presentable, nor with the smooth running of a household.

“Very,” Bridgens assures him with utter conviction.

For a moment, Goodsir looks like it takes all his not insubstantial resolve to hold in either laughter or tears, and then he slumps bonelessly on the armrest of Bridgens’s chair, and thence into his lap. Bridgens catches him to break the slide that would have inevitably ended up with an overturned armchair and both of them in an undignified tumble of limbs on the floor: the awkward bony weight like a giant bird in his arms, a heart beating frantically with the horrified delight of flight. He presses his nose into Harry’s hair and closes his eyes, breathing in a lungful of the day’s sweat, the smell that feels like a homecoming.

Harry, his voice muffled against Bridgens’s shoulder, says, “If you absolutely insist on making it difficult, as I begin to suspect you are in the habit of doing,” — “Yes,” Bridgens whispers, nuzzling at his ear, — “can you at least do so from the comfort of my bedroom?”

“Yes.”

For all his exhaustively elaborate reveries about a time when they would have more time and more space, not to mention more privacy, than their bunkroom afforded—a starving man dreaming of a lavish feast—this is not all that different.

(“Oh God, remember those flimsy doors?”

“Yes.”)

They undress hastily, or as hastily as they can, given that it’s absolutely imperative that they pause every few moments to touch, and kiss, and probe, and taste. Bridgens still manages to fold his clothes into a neat little pile while Harry scatters his every which way with gusto.

(“Remember when someone walked right past?”

“Yes.”)

“Well, if you insist on making it my duty-” Bridgens drawls with exaggerated grumpiness and bends to pick up the discarded vest, ignoring his back’s protest.

“If you are not the most difficult man I know-” Harry says, running his hands over his ribs, with no particular intent but savouring the forgotten joy of touching.

(“Remember how those goddamned berths creaked?”

“Yes.” Oh, the luxury of remembering nonchalantly, safe in the knowledge that more memories can be added to the limited store; the freedom of plunging your hand into the trinket box of memories, pulling up now this bauble, now that, rather than trespassing sneakily into the lands of the past, ever mindful of the fact that you could wear your dwindling ration thin with careless repetitions.)

The bed creaks too though when Harry walks him to it backwards, not breaking the kiss, despite their fumbling steps, until Bridgens’s knees fold against its edge. He doesn’t let Harry go as he falls, pulling him on top and crossing his ankles behind his back. He nuzzles at his jaw, too greedy and uncoordinated for a kiss, too gentle for a bite, and, just this once, too giddy to think.

Bridgens is quiet, even when there are no prying ears around. Harry, it turns out, isn’t: there’s an appreciative hum as he reaches down to rub their cocks together, and a startled joyful yelp when Bridgens pushes up to meet him, and a long contented sigh when Bridgens runs his fingers around his nipple before closing on the nub with a pinch.

He should have been bedding surgeons all his life, he concludes, thrusting into the unrelenting grasp, melting when Harry confidently runs his thumb over the tips of their cocks. They know when to be firm, and they know what they are doing.

It is a while before Bridgens breathlessly asks, pushing up on his elbows, “Do you happen to have something slick? And a pillow to go under my hips. My spine is not as forgiving of vigorous exercise as it once was.”

Harry dissolves into a flurry of excessive care, pressing first one pillow at him, then another, then manhandling rather than helping him into the position, almost pushing him off the bed in the process.

“I’m not frail,” Bridgens says through a chuckle.

“Oh, will you just let me take care of you?”

He spreads his thighs open wider when Harry’s fingers poke at his entrance, suddenly hesitant where no hesitation is required, circling the inner walls and barely skimming the spot that sends shivers through his body. “I’m not frail,” he repeats, and reaches to guide him in.

He does not have another life. Only here, he thinks as Harry pushes in and pauses with a comically perplexed frown that he has to reach up and kiss off; only now. He forgot how much he liked it, this, the stretch, the fullness, feeling pinned to the moment, and safe.

"Thank you," he breathes out in between kisses.

“My pleasure.” Harry’s laughter reverberates deep inside him like a second heartbeat, overwhelming and exhilarating at once.

It takes them a while to find the rhythm, between Harry cosseting him and holding back, and his attempts to pull him closer, hold him in place, grab his arse and push him deeper until he has nothing left to give. When they do, it knocks the breath out of his body, leaving no room for anything but the thrusts, the touches, the slap of skin on wet skin, and, hesitantly, for the courage and freedom to love. Bridgens does not immediately realize that a keening noise he hears is coming from his lips, and does not have it in him to be embarrassed.

Harry hitches him up a bit, folding him almost in half, and drives in an impossible half an inch deeper, then dives in to lick at the hollow at the base of his throat when he throws his head back in a silent scream.

"Am I hurting you?" Harry whispers when he feels him tense.

"You aren’t. My hip is though, a bit."

“Let me kiss it better.”

He makes a protesting noise when Harry withdraws, but goes silent when he trails wet kisses along the line of his hipbone and wraps his lips around his cock. He remembers Harry on the steamboat to England, unpractised but unapologetically enthusiastic, saliva and his seed trailing down his beard; this is more studied now, ruthless almost in exacting pleasure, and he cannot help but wonder at the years he stole from them, and what occupied them; not that he would ever have the right to ask.

“Get on with it, I don’t want to spend like this,” he gasps instead.

“Whyever not?” Harry says before giving him one last long lick, but complies.

Bridgens turns over to lie on his front. It's more careful this time, shallow thrusts made up for with Harry's warm weight on his back. He peppers Bridgens’s spine with slobbery open-mouthed kisses when the steady heartbeat rhythm of his thrusts changes to a staccato of a heart in the throes of horror or love, never too far from one another in any case. Bridgens knows that fear will never not be a part of his life, but right now, like this, with Harry in him and on him, reaching for his cock, humming something half-intelligible at best against the knobs of his spine, it is easy to believe that love will be there too.

Afterwards, he pulls Harry into a hug, his head on his chest, his curls tickling at his collarbone. Dawn slinks in on silent cat paws. Before long, it will be time to get up and get on with figuring out the rest of their lives. Bridgens catches Harry staring intently into the last patches of defiant darkness lingering here and there at the edges of the room.

"What's there?" he asks, running his fingers over Harry’s suddenly tense shoulders.

"Oh, there’s nothing there. Nothing," and his shoulders finally relax in relief. “It’s just us now.”


End file.
